Entries in this City Journal

Life in Addison Harbor has been progressing nicely. What was planned to be purely a industrial town changed and people decided that the plains area of Addison Harbor (AH) would be a lovely place to live and petitioned the city council to open up some land so that they could buy it and develop it for residential purposes.

While at the moment that seems like a good idea, what the people don't realize is that there are already plans on the drawing board that have been approved that would bring the industrial sector right up to the front steps of the new residential homes.

01

Due to the mass amount of Harbor shipping traffic, the state level Government asked (actually asked would have been nice, more like told) the city of Addison Harbor that they must have a coast guard outlet in the city. The blueprints were sent to Mayor Silvermans office for his final stamp of approval and as you can see, that is exactly what he did. The area of land has been requisitioned by the city, buildings are scheduled for demo, and the new coast guard building and piers will be built shortly.

02

Even though Addison Harbor started out predominantly as an industrial harbor town, you could walk along the harbor at night without escort and not worry about getting mugged. But something changed one day and nobody was able to pin point what it was, but it was the same time that the bikers came to town so most people assume they have something to do with it. The mayor and City Planner really aren't convinced that the bikers have anything to do with it, but rather blame it on the weakening Addison Harbor economy. The traffic has been getting worse and worse with the increasing harbor industrial complexes going up what seems almost daily, and the City Planner has been given the task to improve traffic in Addison Harbor. I don't suspect it will be that difficult if I can get the train station board of directors to approve our plans to expand their network.

Note: This is the first time that I've ever seen a motorcycle riding around in the game.

03

The Evergreen corporation has it's own shipping yard in Addison Harbor. It is the primary source of transporting goods in and out of the harbor. It's CEO (James Evergreen) was really displeased however when the city council approved the building plans for another large shipping and transport company (VLS) in the vacant lot right next to them. Evergreen has threatened to just shut down operations in Addison Harbor, but Mayor Oren Silverman shows no signs of concern as he knows that a new shipping and transport company will gladly take their place and or he can make more room for more industrial and have the new shipping company that is currently building their yard will take up the slack and put on more ships if need to be take up the extra shipping business.

04

And, although train transportation is on the decline, Mayor Silverman is more than confident that the old train station can handle any shipping needs should Evergreen actually leave the city. Mayor Silverman has been pestering the train station to expand it's operations into the proposed residential areas so that new traffic can be held to a minimum as the city streets are already backed up with traffic of all the people commuting into Addison Harbor from nearby areas and would like to keep the traffic impact to a minimum. The train stations board of directors are still working out the logistics of a plan to do so, but are concerned about the costs of building a new passenger terminal in the harbor area. We'll have to see where this leads to.

I've been working in Addison Farming District 3A and all of my time has been spent there. The few residents (but increasing) that live in FD 3A have been demanding that they want a recreation area to be installed in town.

Unfortunately adding a super sports complex like many of the residents have been demanding is just plain out of the question and out of the budget, but we have scraped up enough money to put in a little recreation area that includes two ponds, an outdoor soccer (football) field and a lot of area set aside for picnic tables, BBQ's and porta potties.

Unfortunately, it's still under construction so all I have to show you today is a teensy weensy little area.

As it turned out, this little bridge that runs over the little stream that connects the two ponds in the new recreation area turned out to be the most expensive part of the project but not because of the normal reasons. Really, it shouldn't have been very expensive at all, but while in the excavation stage of having this little culvert bridge added, a man was killed when it came time to lay the cement and rocks for this overpass.

Nobody noticed (other than his wife when he didn't come home that night) that he had disappeared until the cement had hardened. His wife that was "curious" about his disappearance but chalked it up that he probably went on another little drinking bender again and gave it little more than a passing thought from time to time.

Well an already too long story made short, the town council eventually heard from somebody that knew somebody who's brothers cousins, sisters, friend that saw the whole disgusting affair as the man fell into the streambed and saw the cement trucks dump their load of rock and cement into the bottom of the stream bed , and now he is permenently encased in the cement and rock flooring of the stream bed and the wife has now started a law suit to sue Addison FD 3A.

The towns city attorneys office is likely to settle for 3 to 5 million dollars instead of trying to battle it out in the courts where they may have to pay even more than that, plus all the bad press they would likely receive. And so, you see, this is probably the entire regions most expensive recreation area to date.

Oh, and are you wondering about the person that originally witnessed the accident but didn't do anything to stop the cement trucks from dumping their load and thus killing the construction worker?

Well, as it turns out, the woman that witnessed it, was actually the ex wife of the man that was killed in the accident, and there being no love loss between them, she didn't tell anybody except for the person that just happened to report it to the police because her conscience was bothering her. The ex wife was denied bale and is currently sitting in the local county jail awaiting a trial date to be set, and charged with assisted manslaughter all because she didn't try to do anything to help her ex husband, and that she didn't report the incident to the police.

It just goes to show you... My future CJ entries are likely to never have any stories attached to them again because my old brain can't keep my story straight and can't make up an interesting story to save my life.

Later this week: The full recreation area in photos and some huge corporate bigwig farmers come to Addison FD 3A.

Northwest Addison started out life as a simple stopover, it's one of those places that you find along some highway road that stretches through the mountains for what seems like eternity, and then out of nowhere a small hamlet or town pops up insight. It usually consists of nothing more than maybe a gas station and a motel. Kind of scary at times to be sure.

N.W. Addison was little different, it consisted of a Shell fueling station and a holiday inn express motel. But with the motel came it's bed turners, it's chefs, and all the other staff that one associates with a hotel / motel. Soon enough some of them grew tired of the long commute through the mountains from West Addison so they left the city behind them and built small cottages, moved their trailer homes and shacks into the area.

The road gets a lot of use as it connects West Addison (see earlier CJ entry) a now bustling town with it's own casino to SimNation by way of N.W. Addison.

Unfortunately, N.W. Addison couldn't stay a secret for very long, and soon enough the rich and affluent moved started to buy up parcels of land, and the workers in town had to move back to W. Addison and go back to making that long commute. Lord help them if they run out of gas as the only gas station between W. Addison and N.W. Addison is in N.W. Addison at the local Shell station.

Soon enough, the area around the hotel and gas station was all taken up, and the national forestry service refused to open up anymore lands in that immediate area for the people to buy, so anybody that wanted to live in the mountains of N.W. Addison had to lease land from the forestry service to build their homes. Well, let me tell you, leasing land from the forestry service isn't a great thing to do as they can up and tell you once your lease is coming due again that they don't want to lease the land to you anymore and you're left figuring out how you are going to move your home to someplace else or you have to just leave it behind. Fortunately for now, the forestry service is not pulling any leases.

And so now you know where we stand with N.W. Addison. It is a rural area at the moment with pockets of communities spread out along it's mountains.

01

And so you can see the first Shell station and the Holiday inn express that was originally the only buildings in town, but as with most stop over places soon enough the rest of the town built up around them.

02

Another one of the small bedroom communities that is further down the valley of Route 2 that runs through W. Addison, to N.W. Addison and finally on to Sim Nation.

03

One of the most recent villages that was built. The residents of N.W.A found this beautiful plauteau and thought it would be a fantastic place to live, so once the city managed to get the power poles up to the area to deliver power, the residents started to build their homes. At the moment they are suffering the urge to really expand but again the forestry service says no.

04

As you might imagine, in communities such as these there are a lot of tree huggers, they hike up the mountain canyon to the area where the shell station is every morning and hike back down every evening instead of driving their vehicles. They live in picture 02 and hike up to picture 01 above.

It seems that as the mountainous roads continue to be built through N.W. Addison's mountains more and more of these bedroom communities are cropping up.

05

Another bedroom community that has grown up out of nowhere, just because the mountain road continues so do the desire to live here. When the Jones's who primarily live in W. Addison one of the most affluent cities in the region have to have a vacation home, so do the Johnsons, and so N.W. Addison continues to grow, community by community, this particular one is still without civic services and their commercial services are marginal at best, but they do have the only Doctors office in the area so people from all the other communities in the area flock here with their chickens and apple pies (as payment) to the doctor. We haven't figured out why he takes that for payment, nor why the people pay him like that since they are almost all rolling in the simoleans.

06

It wasn't long before a very wealthy hotel owner decided that this community would be the premier place for his newest and greatest hotel, and soon enough (see slide 5 above) this community grew, out with the old commercial business's and in with the new. They are now demanding that they get a school, police and fire protection. The Mayor is at his wits ends with all of their demands but I have a feeling he's going to cave in and provide them services as the taxes from this hotel should cove them all and then some.

We'll have to see when the forestry service denies anymore leases on land. But at the moment the forestry service is rolling in the money while the city is struggling since it must provide service to these tiny communities which is quite expensive providing fire, sherrifs and medical services.

We'll see where this goes in the future.

Edit: To give you a better idea of these pocket communities, here is an overview of the three or is it four bedroom pocket communities:

The budget is so bad in N.W. Addison that they will be dismantling the huge steel powerlines and selling off the steel for scrap, in place they are going to run the power lines on the more traditional wooden telephone poles that one sees everywhere as they've found they can sell off the steel and put up the wooden poles and still have a surplus in funds of close to $55,000.00 to add to their treasury which they sorely need right now.

This is Addison Mountains thus far. If you're interested in the region itself it is available on the STEX here for download (just search it's name or search my handle to find it). It is a moderately difficult region in that it takes a lot of terraforming to make it a playable region so that all your buildings don't get the ugly foundations from the somewhat rough terrain. Never the less I enjoy it, and have been terraforming it as I move from tile to tile that I plan to use.

I hope you enjoy the CJ as it's my first and hope that I don't bore you silly, just give me some time to warm up and I'll roll on down the road with you.

The region is broken down into about 4 major metropolitan (or will be) areas, and will have multiple farming lands around it. It also has a harbor that is in process and a bay. It's got a ski resort in one of the cities mountains as well as a city tile that is a more out of the way rural type of city with pockets of population up in the mountainside. This particular tile I think will be the most difficult for me as I really despise seeing rough roads and need them smooth as can be or they just annoy the hell out of me, so this will likely take the most time and cause the most hair loss. [laugh]

Thus far, Addison Mountains has 2 farming districts This is Farming District 2D,

As you might have noticed when the Mayor approved this district he told his City Planner (me) to be as efficient as possible with the zones that we are allowing for farms and don't go squandering any land for flora or fauna. I took the Mayors words to heart and placed the farms as close to each other as possible.

However, there was an outcry for more farming districts in our region and so the Mayor alloted Farming District (FD) 3A and in that FD, the people of Addison Mountains spoke up and said that they wanted a more natural aproach to leaving the landscape in it's more natural state while still filling up the FD with farms, so we switched plans there and here and started to plant more trees in any place that we could that had not yet been built on and resolved that we would from now forth, leave space between farms and not cut down, or if the area was barren, would plant trees between the farms to produce fresh oxygen for the inhabitants of our region.

F A R M I N G D I S T R I C T 3A

And so in FD 3A you can see that we've been planting a lot of trees where there was nothing, or leaving the trees that were there between the farms.

I'm sure you've all heard of the bridge to nowhere right? Well this bridge actually goes somewhere. If it hadn't been for the city council dolling out millions and millions of dollars to have this bridge built, the farm transports would have had to take suburban streets all the way around the region to get to the harbor to ship out their produce. That was extremely inefficient and since the Mayor had already crumbled to the people and lost some efficiency in the planning of the Farming Districts, he kept pushing until he got close to 83% of the funding for this bridge paid for by the National governement. This meant that Addison Mountains only had to come up with a measly 3,000,000 itself towards building the bridge and the rest was paid for by the National Governement.

After the bridge was completed the transportation of produce from 3A to the Harbor cut nearly 3 days off the trip for the truck drivers, and thus it boosted the Mayors ratings by at least 20%, not to mention, good old City Planner here got a raise and was able to move into one of the new skyrise condominiums in West Addison.

Teaser of what's to come:

East Addison gets a new casino, and the Rupert Cerdock Hotel moves into the resort areas high above the city of East Addison. The costs to build the road up the mountain in switchback style cost tens of millions of simoleans however the Casino and Hotel had struck a deal with East Addison to pay for the road with extra taxes.

Mr Cerdock himself moved into one of the Hotels pentouse suites and can often be seen driving around town in his plush motorcar. I think, yes, yes, you can see him here in this photo driving around the resort area. You can usually spot Mr Cerdock by the big flashy zot that he flys on the roof of his car to let everybody know that he's coming.

West Addison was so jealous when the deal was struck as they were looking to make the same deal themselves however their tax rate offered to Mr Cerdock and the Casion board couldn't match that of East Addison. However, East Addison did accept the plan from W. Addison to extend a road from W. Addison over the mountain ranges to hook up with the casino, hotel and the new ski resort that is in the building stages right now.

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